The Girls of Room 28

by Hannelore Brenner

  Then there’s a woman who was put on a transport even though she was ill. She swallowed some kind of powder, but not enough to kill her. They pumped out her stomach. Outside the door is an O.D. man [abbreviation for Ordnungsdienst—police duty], and whenever one of the two women goes to the toilet, he accompanies them and waits till they come out in order to escort them back to their ward. They are prisoners from the Dresden Barracks prison and are in the hospital only for as long as they are ill.

  Sunday, October 24, 1943

  Yesterday some of the girls begged the counselors to ask us a series of questions. I answered eight out of ten, so eighty percent. Eva Stern and I have agreed to test each other once a month on our general knowledge.

  Wednesday, October 27, 1943

  Yesterday evening Rita criticized us in a roundabout way: “The person I have in mind is an intelligent girl who longs to learn things, who was once very spoiled, but has put that behind her, except that elements of her spoiled nature still appear from time to time. You can tell that she’s an only child, because she is sometimes very moody.” And then we had to guess who it was. It was me.—She told Fiška that she has a very poetic soul.

  Fiška and I seem to spend more time thinking than any of the other girls in our room. I was steeped in thought well into the night. At about 11 o’clock I took out some paper and a pencil, and in the dark I wrote this sentence: Thinking and reflecting make you forget your poverty, and the world seems beautiful, mysterious, and unfathomable.

  Thursday, October 28, 1943

  Yesterday evening I spoke with Erica. We might be able to get along quite well. She gave me a little heart she had cut out. We have almost the same view of things. Erika doesn’t have a close girlfriend, and neither do I. We both have Rita as a friend. My conscience has been troubling me of late, and I feel as if I’m doing everything wrong. But that’s been the case only since I’ve begun to think a lot about everything. And I’ve been unsure of myself ever since. But now Rita has explained to me that only stupid people are sure of themselves and their behavior. The smarter people are, the more they doubt. THINKING IS THE FINEST THING IN THE WORLD.

  Professor Brumliková is a genius when it comes to lecturing. Although I was born after the First World War, I’ve found that her accounts bring this history to life for me. Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Hapsburgs. And let’s hope that there will soon be another “October 28th,” be it in January or in May. And that it will come just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it did back then. When that day comes, we will all hug and rejoice. Benes and Masaryk will return, and Czechoslovakia will be a free country once again. Throughout the Czech lands, people will be singing “Where Is My Home?”

  Where is my home? Where is my home?

  Waters murmur across the meads

  Pinewoods rustle ’pon the cliff-rocks,

  Bloom of spring shines in the orchard,

  Paradise on Earth you see!

  And that is the beautiful land,

  The Czech land, my home!

  The Czech land, my home!

  Yesterday evening I asked Papa whether he would be angry with me if I had myself baptized as an adult. I told him that I feel no real connection with the Jews, their history, and their sufferings. I don’t feel I’m bound to them. Papa’s answer was: “When you’re an adult you can do whatever you want, and I won’t forbid you to do anything, and certainly not try to change your mind.” I’ll never forget those words for as long as I live! I have a real Papa. If everyone had a father like him, the world would be a very different place.

  Before I began to contemplate matters of this kind, I was restless and consumed with worry about Mama. But since I’ve begun to think so much, I’ve found an inner contentment. This peculiar feeling can’t really be called tranquillity, since I’m forever coming up with something new to brood about—especially things that concern the world as a whole: people, races, and nations. In a word: everything.

  And another thing—damn, I could fill a whole notebook today! At the moment I don’t feel anything for our Home, just for Rita and Erika and for Fiška. But I’m so caught up in my own thoughts that I don’t know what’s happening around me.

  Marta Fröhlich had been a resident of Room 28 since late September 1943. She had previously lived in Room 24, together with her sister Zdenka. The two sisters needed distance from each other, which was why the counselors decided to find another spot for Marta.

  Marta and her four siblings—two sisters, Ruzenka and Zdenka, and two brothers, Jenda and Jarda—were no strangers to many of the children. In Prague the girls had lived in the orphanage on Hybernska and the boys in the orphanage on Belgicka. Hanka Wertheimer, who had lived nearby, often walked to school with Marta, whom many people called by her nickname, Frta, which was made up of the first two letters of her last name, Fröhlich, and the last two letters of her given name, Marta; it’s the kind of abbreviation only Czechs are able to form and pronounce.

  Only a few people really knew why the Fröhlich children were living in orphanages. In fact, Hanka didn’t even know what an orphanage was. “But it was clear to me that the children who lived there were very poor.”

  Ela Stein had also known the Fröhlich children in Prague, if only in passing, but well enough to be taken aback when she noticed something odd while gazing out the windows of the Girls’ Home in February 1943. “I saw five brothers and sisters being brought to Theresienstadt, accompanied by a couple of men in uniform. There was a barracks lockdown that day.”

  What could it mean? Ela wondered. Why of all people were the Fröhlich children being brought to the ghetto by special transport? Years later Frta related what had happened to her siblings the previous night.

  It was early in 1943. The transports had been running in high gear for over a year. My brothers and sisters and I were living at the orphanage on Belgicka at the time. One evening, word suddenly came that the Fröhlich children were to report to the Gestapo the next morning. We didn’t know why. The next morning we were all taken to Gestapo headquarters. Even Ruzenka, who was in the hospital on Lublanska with pneumonia, was fetched and brought to the Gestapo. Once we were there, we were locked in a cold, dark cellar. There was nothing to eat or drink. Only the several layers of clothing and the coats that we had put on just in case provided a little warmth. Late that afternoon we were taken to be interrogated. We didn’t know what they wanted from us. They treated us like criminals. The first thing they did was to take my brother Jenda’s lovely watch away. He had only recently been given this watch at his bar mitzvah in the synagogue on Maislova, where he had sung beautifully. He had received other gifts as well. Everything we had with us was confiscated: identification papers, rings, a little silver necklace, money. When my ring wouldn’t come off, the SS man screamed at me and threatened to chop off my finger. The German was starting to come toward me when Jenda placed himself in front of me to protect me, and was given a hard kick by the SS man, while at the same time my little brother Jarda, only eleven at the time, threw himself at the SS man. Jenda had already tried to settle him down and told him to stay calm. But at that moment Jarda, who could get very angry and was a fighter by nature, could no longer control his temper and threw himself at the SS man and bit his hand, but the SS man just flung him to one side.

  We were terrified of what would happen next. But the German didn’t do anything to him and just said, “You’re the only one I like. I’d like to have a courageous son like you.” Meanwhile, I had been turning so hard at the ring on my finger that it finally came off. Then we had to sign something. The boys signed their names very quickly, but I took my time and scribbled mine. The Gestapo man grabbed me by the hair, banged my head against the wall, and shouted at me that my name wasn’t Fröhlichová, but Fröhlich. My sister Zdenka signed correctly because Jenda told her to. Our youngest, Ruzenka, couldn’t write yet. Besides, she had a fever of over 104 degrees. She lay on the stone floor, and the booted SS men kic
ked her. When we circled around to protect her, they kicked us. Then they put us all back in the cellar.

  Marta Fröhlich had a special friend in Room 28: Eva Winkler. Marta liked this girl with her blue eyes and striking long dark eyelashes. Eva was a girl with a heart, considerate and loving—just like her father, Fritz Winkler, who took the Fröhlich children under his wing when he saw how vulnerable their situation in the ghetto was.

  The first few days after their arrival in Theresienstadt, they had to spend their nights on a plank frame in an overcrowded barracks, in the farthest corner of a long hallway. Behind their sleeping quarters, separated only by a thin wall of boards, was a toilet bucket that could be reached only by stepping over the planks on which the children were supposed to sleep—and, of course, their sleep was constantly disrupted. They were liberated from “Hotel WC,” as Marta calls their first quarters in Theresienstadt, a few days later by their uncle Franta, who was already living in the ghetto, only to wind up in an old barracks where the stench was not as intense, but where they suffered from the icy cold. What good was an old stove in a corner of the room, when there was neither wood nor coal to heat it—not even a match to light it?

  It was Fritz Winkler who came to the aid of the Frölich children. He worked in a carpentry workshop, and now and then he was able to slip them some wood to heat the stove. And he soon became a fatherly friend—just what they so desperately needed. Their own father, who had arrived in the ghetto shortly after they did, was the same man in Theresienstadt as he had always been—angry and short-tempered. “We once brought him something to eat,” Marta recalls. “And he went wild and almost hit us—because it was so little! The other men in the room came to our aid. They were furious at him, and almost clobbered him because he didn’t appreciate what we had brought him.”

  Things were very different with Eva Winkler. She appreciated Marta’s gifts. When Marta discovered her passion for collecting the slips of paper that Palmera razor blades came wrapped in, she asked her two brothers to “organize” as many as they could for her new friend, thus adding to Eva’s already considerable collection. Eva treated this collection like a treasure trove. What a disaster it would be if even one of these prettily illustrated papers were to disappear! Eva would have been miserable, as is evident from a little song the girls made up and merrily sang sometimes: “Herr Winkler’s daughter’s sobs can be heard, / a tragedy has now occurred. / It’s lost, it’s lost—you ask what’s lost? / The Palmeras have been lost. / Yes, yes, yes / it’s as clear as day / Yes, yes, yes / it’s true in its way.”

  One day Eva showed her new friend something quite different—the pictures she had painted with Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. “I’d love to learn to do that, too. It’s lovely!” Marta said in astonishment. Shortly after that, Eva took her along for drawing lessons in Room 28.

  For many children, art classes with Friedl Dicker-Brandeis were bright stars in the gloom of the ghetto. “During art class I was oblivious to everything else,” Helga recalls. “There was only that big table with the painting supplies, even though the paper was nothing much, sometimes just waste paper or packing paper from some old packages. But at these moments I felt like a free human being.”

  The children painted and drew, did handicrafts, and made collages. Friedl supplied the paints, brushes, pencils, and paper, and often brought a few art books or objects that served as models—a vase, a Dutch wooden shoe, a teapot. One day, she would offer a theme—an animal in a landscape, or would simply say, “Storm, wind, evening—paint it!” Another day, she would sketch a fantasy story in a few sentences or would say nothing more than “Paint where you would like to be now. Paint what you wish for yourself. Paint whatever means a great deal to you.” Or, “Look out the window and paint what you see.”

  There was usually a hush while the children worked. Friedl radiated a magical aura that inspired them. “You didn’t have to draw well. That was not what really mattered,” Helga says, describing her teaching method. “The crucial thing was that you developed your talents, that you learned to see. To recognize colors. To play with colors. To move your hand in time to music or a specific rhythm. For example, she would rap out a certain tempo on the table, and we were supposed to draw according to the rhythm. Her method of instruction gave us moments of lightheartedness. She had a capacity for awakening in us a positive attitude toward our condition, toward life in Theresienstadt. In her presence everything seemed to fall into place—more or less all on its own.”

  When she entered Room 28, Friedl did not always find calm, disciplined pupils who were eager to paint. Sometimes they were anything but. But in a flash, Friedl was able to engage the children in her subject. Most often it was rhythmic exercises that helped. “Besides making the painter’s hand and whole person light and flexible, such exercises are an appropriate means by which to turn an unruly mob of individuals into a working group ready to devote itself cooperatively to a cause,” she wrote in a report in mid-1943, on the first anniversary of the establishment of the Theresienstadt Children’s Homes. “Moreover, they lift the child out of old habits of thinking and seeing [and] present the child with a task that can be fulfilled with delight and fantasy and yet with the greatest precision.”5

  Friedl loved children, and children loved her. This small, energetic woman with short, light brown hair, hazelnut brown eyes, and a gentle, bright voice was always cordial, always calm and patient with them. She did not reprimand the children, push them too hard, or coerce them in any way. Using fantasy and intuition, she set about her work in a playful spirit. She watched with interest her pupils’ first, hesitant efforts at painting, cautiously asked questions, casually steered their attention. Above all, she encouraged the children to follow their own ideas and inspirations, and to give them graphic expression. One of her basic principles was: “Let the child be free to express himself.”

  Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was forty-four years old when she, her husband, Pavel Brandeis, and her friend Laura Šimko arrived in Theresienstadt on December 17, 1942, on transport “Ch” from Hradec Králové. In acknowledgment of her career as an artist, she was first assigned to the “Technical Department,” a sort of engineering office whose official task was the production of whatever technical drawings the ghetto needed. But this SS-sanctioned activity produced creative work that documented the reality of life in the ghetto—studies, sketches, paintings, posters— hundreds of works in all. The department was headed by the painter Bedřich Fritta (aka Fritz Taussig). At his side were experienced colleagues: Otto Ungar, Leo Haas, Felix Bloch, Jo Spier, the young Peter Kien, and others.

  The strict documentary realism characteristic of these artists was not really in Friedl’s nature. Her understanding of art was nourished by other sources. Her interests moved her in a different direction, and soon, following her inner desires, she was to be found only among the children.

  In her classes Friedl passed on her rich trove of experience in both artistic and human realms, rousing in the children latent energies that could function as a positive counterweight to their oppressive existence and that could restore their psychological balance. She awakened memories of what was good in the children’s past and strengthened their hope for a better future. And she helped them recapture some of their self-confidence and build up their courage. In this way she lived up to her credo: “Wherever energy reflects upon itself and, without fear of appearing ridiculous, attempts to prevail on its own, a new source of creativity opens up—and that is the goal of our attempts to teach drawing.”

  Proof that she succeeded, if only for a few hours, is found in the more than three thousand drawings created by children under her leadership— each one a child’s witness to life in the ghetto. They offer a message different from that of the drawings and paintings by Theresienstadt’s adult artists, who were committed to documentary realism. This was the case not only because children painted and drew these pictures, but also because the work of these children reveals the influence of a particular sch
ool of art and of a very modern theory of artistic pedagogy. These children’s drawings—some of which can be considered works of art— are the result of an ambitious professional method of instruction and the influence of an extraordinarily gifted teacher.

  Born Friederike Dicker in Vienna on July 30, 1898, she began her education in art as a sixteen-year-old pupil of Franz Cizek at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. Cizek, whose drawing and painting classes were founded on the principle of the free development of spontaneous artistic expression, helped give birth to what would ultimately become modern art therapy. Cizek and Johannes Itten, whose private art school Friedl attended a year later, gave her the crucial foundation for her own work. It was above all Itten’s artistic instruction—which was based on chiaroscuro, color composition, and rhythmic drawing exercises, and on the principle of recognizing and appreciating individual expression—that provided the fundamental methodology for her work as an artist.

  Friedl Dicker-Brandéis (1898–1944)

  When Johannes Itten was invited by Walter Gropius to be part of the Bauhaus in 1919, Friedl followed her teacher to Weimar. The innovative concepts of this most influential art school of the twentieth century matched the ideas and expectations of the young art student eager to put theory into practice. “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is the exalted craftsman,” Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, proclaimed in a prospectus that called for an end to traditional idealized concepts of art and for the ennoblement of the work of the craftsman.

  For the next four years Friedl studied all that the Bauhaus had to offer: textile design with Georg Muche, lithography with Lyonel Feininger, and theater design with Oskar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer. She learned bookbinding, graphic design, weaving, and embroidery. After Paul Klee arrived at the Bauhaus in 1921, she never missed one of his lectures—or any opportunity to watch over her revered master’s shoulder as he worked. Along with Franz Cizek and Johannes Itten, it was above all Paul Klee who became the inspiration for her remarkable pedagogical achievements, which ultimately reached their full maturity in her art classes in Theresienstadt.